The People’s Cinema

Involving the creative input of over sixty participants, The People’s Cinema includes an exhibition by contemporary artists; three cinema pavilions, a lecture series, and side projects.

From its inception to its many permutations throughout the last century, to its current quotidian status, to more personal forms of video or avant-garde film and video, to the digital revolution and online streaming… an endless tableau of images and associations is available for artists to work with.

We call this The People’s Cinema.

This project engages artists who work with this vast material and who produce artwork that acts out the dreamwork of moving pictures. The People’s Cinema appears as a collective phantasmagoria throughout the spaces of the Salzburger Kunstverein. Where cinema normally depicts objects and the world, one might imagine objects arising out of film; in a spiral between imagination, memory, desire, flesh and cinematic apparatuses. The space of cinema and the cave of associations it bears also presents wandering ghosts and spells of sensations that urge our desires and create new ones. One might imagine the object emerging from the screen that itself contains a dream. When one enters into this object, into its ripe and dark interior, one may find there another screen presenting familiar and non-familiar forms.

Images, ideas, dreams and life become one.

Exhibition: The work of fifteen contemporary artists are presented in the Main Hall, Kabinett Space, Red Room, and surroundings of the Salzburger Kunstverein. A participatory project by artist-in-residence Anna Witt will also be unveiled.

Cinema Pavilions: Three cinema pavilions, including one outdoors designed by Erika Hock, house montaged films selected by international artists, film-makers, writers and curators. The central themes presented to frame the pavilions’ content are Road to Damascus, Eternal Return and The Object. The clips have been ordered to follow a loose narrative structure.